Wiki+Research

[|Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars Wiki as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool In The Wiki Way (2001),] the one and only book devoted solely to wiki, Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham define wiki as "a freely expandable collection of interlinked Web 'pages,' a hypertext system for storing and modifying information — a database, where each page is easily editable by any user with a forms-capable Web browser client" (page 14). Wiki pages are controlled — created, linked, edited, deleted, moved, renamed, and so on — by a programming or scripting language, and stored either as plain ASCII text files or in an external relational database, such as MySQL, Oracle, or PostgreSQL. Wiki pages are only rendered or displayed as HTML through templates by the wiki Web server. Ward's original wiki was written in Perl, and he released the script as copyright-limited open source. Since 1995, many other talented individuals have produced dozens of wiki clones or wiki-like Web content management systems (WCMS), most often under an open source license, in various programming or scripting languages that run on every microprocessor platform imaginable, including PDAs and smartphones. Some of these implementations are free for personal and commercial use, others are free for personal use only. Still more are strictly commercial only and may offer either a downloadable limited-feature or time-limited executable program. This article looks chiefly at completely free (both personal and commercial use allowed) or shareware open source products. An excellent starting point, and one Ward calls canonical, for wiki clone software is at WikiWikiWeb **WikiEngines****[|[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines]]**. If you wish to delve deeper into the philosophical and metaphysical realms of wikidom, go to these pages on Ward's WikiWikiWeb: